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Assessing the Legality of Sandra Bland’s Arrest

A dashboard camera video released by Texas officials, which contains vulgar language, confirms accounts of a physical confrontation between Sandra Bland and a state trooper. Ms. Bland, an African-American woman from the Chicago area, was arrested on July 10 during a traffic stop. She died three days later in her jail cell. Her arrest and cause of death remain in dispute.Related Article

Tensions Rise

Ms. Bland is pulled over and accused of failing to use a turn signal. Brian T. Encinia, a state trooper, approaches her car, takes her information and returns to his vehicle to write a ticket. When Trooper Encinia returns, he asks if she is O.K. and says that Ms. Bland seems irritated.

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

Can a routine traffic stop lead to an arrest?

Failure to use a turn signal is technically an arrestable offense in Texas, though it rarely happens, according to Andrea Roth, an expert in criminal procedure who works as an assistant law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Rebecca Robertson, the legal and policy director for A.C.L.U. in Texas, said, “The initial stop should not have resulted in an arrest.” Trooper Encinia could have just handed Ms. Bland a ticket through the window and let her drive away, she said.

“Get out of the car”

Trooper Encinia asks Ms. Bland to put out a cigarette. When she refuses, he tells her to get out of the car. After Ms. Bland refuses to step out of the car, he threatens to remove her by force, saying, “I’m giving you a lawful order.”

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

In a traffic stop, is it legal for an officer to order a driver to put out a cigarette and exit the car?

Ms. Bland has a right to smoke in her car, but Trooper Encinia could argue that the cigarette was interfering with legitimate police business. Since he had already processed the papers, however, “I don’t see a good reason,” said Robert Weisberg, a criminal procedure expert and law professor at Stanford University. During a traffic stop, a police officer has the right to ask a driver to get out of the car even for a non-arrestable offense, as a way of securing his own safety. The officer has almost complete discretion and the driver is legally obligated to get out when asked. “He has control over the location of drivers,” Mr. Weisberg said. “It is equal to an officer patting you down to see if you have a gun.” In this case, Mr. Weisberg said, there is no evidence that Trooper Encinia feared for his safety. He would have to argue that Ms. Bland’s refusal to put the cigarette out gave him the impression that she was violent. If Trooper Encinia had feared for his safety, he would not have walked away from the car for five minutes, Mr. Weisberg said.

Escalating Force

Trooper Encinia reaches into the car to remove Ms. Bland. Ms. Bland refuses to cooperate. He repeats “You are under arrest” and requests backup. After a struggle, Trooper Encinia pulls out a taser and yells, “I will light you up.” Ms. Bland exits the car.

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

Is there a legal basis for arresting Ms. Bland at this point? Is it legal to pull a driver out of the car?

The only possible basis for telling Ms. Bland that she is under arrest is the crime of resisting a lawful order to get out of the car, unless Trooper Encinia had told her that he was arresting her for the traffic violation, Mr. Weisberg said. If there is clearly a lawful order to get the driver out of the car and if the officer has no other choice, he can pull the driver out. But he must have exhausted all of the alternatives first, and Trooper Encinia seems to escalate things very quickly, Mr. Weisberg said. “The motive for yanking her out seems to be her rude behavior,” he said.Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference that Trooper Encinia had not complied with the department’s courtesy policy and procedures, including “letting the individual know what action is going to be taken.”

The Arrest

The action continues outside of the view of the dashboard camera. Ms. Bland is heard yelling, “You are about to break my wrist.” Another officer is heard assisting in restraining her. Ms. Bland says that she cannot hear and that her head has been slammed into the ground.

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

Is it legal for an officer to use force while arresting someone?

“What’s disturbing here was that she was arrested for assaulting an officer,” Ms. Robertson said. “He had to arrest her because she was resisting arrest, but her resistance is a response to the officer escalating the situation.”Use of force against a citizen is allowed when an officer is arresting someone, but it should be proportional to the circumstance, she said. “While they are forcefully holding her down, I don’t think a judge would see that restraint as disproportionate physical force against Ms. Bland,” Ms. Roth said.In the arrest affidavit, Trooper Encinia described Ms. Bland as “combative and uncooperative” and said she had begun swinging at him with her elbows after she was removed from the car, handcuffed and forcibly subdued.

Another View of the Incident

A video of the arrest recorded by a bystander, below, shows Ms. Bland on the ground with the trooper standing above her.

Monday, July 13: Death

About 6:30 a.m., Ms. Bland refuses a breakfast tray. Shortly after 7 a.m. she responds, “I’m fine” to a jailer making the rounds, officials say, and she later asks how to make a phone call.Shortly after 9 a.m., a jailer finds her hanging. A video released by the sheriff’s office shows that there was no activity in the hallway leading to her cell for about 90 minutes before an officer checked on her and then called for help. The closed-circuit video below shows guards and a nurse rushing toward Ms. Bland’s cell. Emergency workers unsuccessfully administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation before she was pronounced dead at 9:16 a.m.

Source: Reuters

The Waller County Sheriff’s Office issues a statement saying that Ms. Bland was found not breathing from what appeared to be self-inflicted asphyxiation. An autopsy classifies her death as suicide by hanging. County officials say she was found in a “semi-standing position,” hanged with a plastic trash-can liner affixed to a U-shaped metal hook on a partition in her cell. Friends and relatives have expressed skepticism at police statements that Ms. Bland killed herself, and they have called for an independent autopsy. “Based on the Sandy that I knew, that's unfathomable to me,” another sister of Ms. Bland’s, Sharon Cooper, said at a news conference in Chicago.